Appearances

 

DEVOTION

THE 1^ST LETTER TO THE CORINTHIANS

APPEARANCES

1 Cor 15:35-44

35 But someone may ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?" 36 How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37 When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38 But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. 39 All flesh is not the same: Men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another. 40 There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another. 41 The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor. 42 So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; 43 it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44 it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.

NIV

There is more to be said about the difference between our natural body and our spiritual body, or our outer man and our inner man, but for now, let us just ponder on the idea of how that all plays out. It seems the general idea many believers have is that this body will be raised from the grave looking just like we look now, except perhaps in a younger, stronger, better-shaped version of who we are when we die. We wonder what age we will be, and how well in shape we will be. But Paul says that is foolishness. Although we are the form which God handcrafted us into and breathed His breath into us, giving us life, He created us with a form, but it is His breath that gave us life. We have this life, this inner man, our spirit, is what has life, which causes this form to have animation. In some sense what we are now is merely the seed of who we will be in heaven. As Paul says this seed, our body must die, and God will bring about the body he determines from the seed. We are now perishable and corruptible but when we die, we will be raised imperishable and incorruptible and, in a form, determined by God. We are going to have a spiritual body, not like this natural one. In all reality, we have no idea how we are going to look. But the fact remains, we will be raised in glory, with power and imperishable. We will be eternal beings, again of the design and crafting of God. We know that when Jesus was resurrected, he did not appear exactly as he did in the natural, for Mary did not recognize him until he called her name. He appeared within a locked room to his disciples, simple appeared. He did not walk in, or knock on the door, he just appeared, which a natural body cannot do. The two men on the road did not know it was Jesus, until he broke the bread at dinner with them, although that talked for miles on the road together with him. Maybe we get some wrong ideas from movies, such as “ghost”, When Patrick Swayze stays after death, to take revenge on his friend who killed him. He appears just like he was except with a glow or sorts. But the fact remains, from these verses, that we may not know how we will appear, but we will appear before God, and receive our reward, What we look like is not the issue, but the fact that we will be alive for all eternity in the everlasting presence of our Lord.